‘I’m frightened of the horse bolting with me without me being paid,’ said Flash Jack. ‘I know that horse; he’s got a mouth like iron. I might be at the bottom of the cliff on Crown Ridge road in twenty minutes with my head caved in, and then what chance for the quids?’
‘You wouldn’t want ‘em then,’ suggested a passenger. ‘Or, say!—we’d leave the fiver with the publican to bury you.’
Flash Jack ignored that passenger. He eyed his boots and softly whistled a tune.
‘All right!’ said the man in the cork hat, putting his hand in his pocket. ‘I’ll start with a quid; stump up, you chaps.’
The five pounds were got together.
‘I’ll lay a quid to half a quid he don’t stick on ten minutes!’ shouted Jim to his mates as soon as he saw that the event was to come off. The passengers also betted amongst themselves. Flash Jack, after putting the money in his breeches-pocket, let down the rails and led the horse into the middle of the yard.
‘Quiet as an old cow!’ snorted a passenger in disgust. ‘I believe it’s a sell!’
‘Wait a bit,’ said Jim to the passenger, ‘wait a bit and you’ll see.’
They waited and saw.
Flash Jack leisurely mounted the horse, rode slowly out of the yard, and trotted briskly round the corner of the shanty and into the scrub, which swallowed him more completely than the sea might have done.